


if the bad guys don't get you, baby, then the good guys will

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Force (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gladiators, Mojoworld, Personhood, Shatterstar (2018) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 06:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17278856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Windsong falls in love with Sovereignshard despite the chaos of Mojoworld. Attachments come with a price.





	if the bad guys don't get you, baby, then the good guys will

“I wasn’t made for this,” Windsong confides in him one night, combing the blood out of her hair as she stands beneath the spigot of water. “The fights, the arena. I wasn’t designed for it.” She tells him this quietly, beneath the cover of the running water, because it’s a terrible secret. It’s a terrible weakness. Now that he knows, he can destroy her. Giving away the secret doesn’t make her feel weaker, though. Makes her feel stronger. Like she owns something. Sharing the secret only enforces the fact that it is  _ hers _ to share, just like sharing her rations felt.  _ Owning _ rather than being owned.  _ Sharing _ rather than suffering alone. “I was meant to be a soap star. I would have been an actress cast alongside a legion of romantic leads. Still controlled. Still owned. But…” She watches water spiraling down the drain in the floor. “Less blood in my hair.”

“Perhaps,” Sovereignshard says. He hands her a towel. It isn’t soft, but at least it’s dry. “How did you end up a fighter?”

Windsong switches spots with him. Only so much water is allowed throughout the gladiatorial quarters. By showering consecutively, they manage to save some, drop by drop. (Showering together would save even more, maybe, but that’s unthinkable. Seeing each other naked like this is one thing, but being that close, sharing space like that… another animal entirely.) 

“The programmers saw what I could do,” Windsong says darkly, drying herself while Sovereignshard showers. “They determined that my skills would be best utilized in the arena.” 

“I know it’s not fair to you,” Sovereignshard says suddenly, his hair growing curlier in the steam from the shower, “but part of me is pleased you ended up here. If you were an actress… I might never have met you. That is selfish, I know. But it is the truth.”

Windsong watches him, wonder in every line of her face. But she shakes it off. “Wash,” she reminds him. “You’re wasting water.”

* * *

“I’ll kill him,” Sovereignshard snarls. “Za’s vid,  _ breeding _ you with him, no choice or say in the matter. I will  _ kill  _ him.”

“It’s not as if he gets any say either,” Windsong reminds him. “Shatterstar is a pawn. Just like you. Just like me. You want to be angry, Sov? Be angry at Mojo.”

“And what will that get us?”

Windsong sighs. “I don’t know,” she admits. “But… it isn’t Shatterstar’s fault.”

“You’re right,” he says. “Mojo wants to make him your husband. To breed the great Shatterstar and WIndsong. To create an army of perfect clones. We can’t let that happen.” His jaw is taut and tense. She raises a hand, cups her palm around his face. There was a time when she could not come close to him like this without him flinching away or fending her off. There was a time when she would have done the same. “ _ I _ won’t,” he continues. “We will rescue him. Bring him into the Cadre Alliance.” 

“Yes,” she says softly. It is a battle to be soft, every day. It is one of the things she clings dearly to, a hard-won prize. Owning things, gentle touches, being soft. Privileges she is fighting every day to defend. 

“I’ll go,” Sovereignshard says. “To save him.” He rakes a hand through his curls, mussing up his hair. “ _ Fekt _ . I don’t like leaving things up to the Cadre Alliance. I know we’re a part of them now but… but there is a part of me that still believes it is just you and me, and the universe.” 

“You’re right,” Windsong says. “It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s the universe. The universe… it isn’t against us, or between us. It’s all around us.”

* * *

That night, she is waiting, and then the small troop of rebels bursts into her quarters. “We need to go,” one of them says, his armor dotted with dark blood. “You need to go, Windsong.”

“No… wait,” she says, like her mind isn’t moving fast enough. “What about Shatterstar?”

“They got to him,” another rebel says. “Bring your weapons, singer. You’re no longer safe in the compound.”

“Wait, wait,” she says, collecting her knives even as she tries to get an explanation. “I don’t understand. Where is Sovereignshard?”

The Cadre Alliance is composed of gladiators who learned long ago that they are not the emotionless, power-hungry beasts Mojo V intends them to be. The look that passes over each rebel’s face is mournful, sad, apologetic. Windsong sees it, recognizes it. Grief. Remorse. 

Pity.

“N-no,” she chokes out, hands frozen in the middle of stuffing her few belongings in a satchel. “What happened? Where is he?”

“Like I said, they got to Shatterstar,” the rebel tells her. “He didn’t understand. He was told that we were coming to kill him.” 

“But you explained,” she says, her voice rising. “You explained that you were there to rescue him from the arena. Surely he must have…?”

“There wasn’t time,” the first rebel says, helping her with her bag. That motion alone is so significant— another person, providing her assistance at a time like this— and momentarily she is so overwhelmed with loss and shock and the terrifying notion of being a part of something larger than herself that she can hardly breathe. “Sovereignshard was cancelled.”

“He was killed,” she says. “He was a person, and he was killed.” 

“Windsong—”

“I know,” she says, accepting her satchel from the other rebel. Her time here is over. “We have to go.”

* * *

In her subsequent travels through time and space, Windsong doesn’t meet her “husband” until many years later. (Or prior… time travel is perplexing, even still.) She meets him for the first time— not on a vid screen, not through the chants of an audience, but in person— while fighting another incarnation of Mojo on Earth. 

In a quiet moment, while Longshot strategizes with Quark, Gog and the X-Men, Windsong and Shatterstar find time to speak to each other. 

“I understand what I took from you,” Shatterstar says, and his voice is startlingly… normal. For so long she pictured him larger than life. It is something else, now, to see him not as an opponent or an ally, but as a man. A person, just like she is, just like Sovereignshard was. “I can never make that right. I am…  _ deeply _ sorry.” 

What is she supposed to say to that? “Shatterstar,” Windsong says, “I have killed my brothers and sisters in the arena. I know what it is like to be… used. To be played, as in a game. I want you to know… I don’t blame you for what happened to Sov. As far as I’m concerned, Mojo killed the man I loved.” 

“But I still—”

“I know.” Because these are words she can say, and they feel right but there is still something knotted up in her stomach when she thinks about the man in front of her watching the life bleed out from Sovereignshard. Shatterstar is as much of a weapon as she was, but he is also just as much of a person, and who knows if she can ever reconcile that? 

Working with the Cadre Alliance, and later with Longshot’s rebels, has changed her from the gladiator she was. She is still a warrior, no longer a tool. And she can use her voice for so much more than killing now. She can use it to be grateful, to apologize, to praise. 

She can use it to forgive, but that is much harder. 

She uses it now to say, “Friends?” and extends a hand toward the man in front of her. 


End file.
